On My Mind; Kissinger, Peace and P.O.W.'s

In the winter of 1973, the Nixon-Kissinger team and its most passionate American enemies were in agreement on one overriding judgment: The war in Vietnam was lost and had to be ended.

About 17 years earlier, President Eisenhower had begun sending military advisers and intelligence operators into Vietnam -- the first American involvement. Then Presidents Kennedy and Johnson each chose to deepen a war that tore apart American society long before it was over.

Richard Nixon became the only President to try, almost desperately, to end the war through negotiation. Without Henry Kissinger those negotiations would not have started, or ended in a peace agreement.

Two decades later Americans still want and deserve a full accounting of any U.S. prisoners of war not freed, and what was done about them, or left undone.

But the value of the Senate hearings on P.O.W.'s will be ruined if they become just one more arena for politicians, academics and journalists who cherish their vendetta against Mr. Kissinger, one more chance to treat a man without whom the peace agreement would have been impossible as some unindicted conspirator.

The very fact that he dares defend himself -- with a kind of professional, respectful contempt -- enrages them even more.

To select Mr. Kissinger as the target is unfair historically. And it lessens the chances of two central realities being made clear. One is that the villain was Hanoi, now cuddly Hanoi. Only the Communists could have kept any Americans hostage.

The other is that through callousness or sloth, every Administration during and since the war failed to clarify the P.O.W. story -- else we would not still be asking questions.

As a condition of peace, Mr. Kissinger insisted on a Communist commitment to release all prisoners. Maybe tougher safeguards could have been written into the agreement. Would Congress and the peace activists have accepted the continuation of the war that might have meant?

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Hardly likely. In 1971, two years before any peace agreement, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who became a peace activist, said that "points" presented by Hanoi-Vietcong delegations in Paris, and their conversations with him and other Americans, showed prisoners would be returned. So, he said, the U.S. should not "stall" any longer.

Mr. Kerry is now a talented Senator from Massachusetts. And now he is conducting a P.O.W. inquiry because so many Americans believe exactly what he thought could not happen -- that the Communists kept some prisoners.

Not long after the peace agreement was signed, Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon warned that some prisoners might still be held. Did the peace movement or Congress demand reprisal pressures against Hanoi?

Mr. Kissinger's essential role in ending the war does not wipe out the Senate's duty to investigate the fate of all P.O.W.'s, but it distorts reality to forget what happened in 1973.

Walter Isaacson, in his much-discussed biography "Kissinger," is often sharply critical of his subject. But he puts criticism of the peace negotiations in this perspective:

"By the beginning of 1973, Kissinger and Nixon had brought the nation's military misadventure in Vietnam to an end. Instead of slinking away as the Vietnamese factions continued the war, Kissinger had secured a cease-fire that, at least for the moment, curtailed the killing. In addition, America's ally had been given a decent chance to survive.

"Officials in the previous two Administrations, many of whom became preening doves as soon as their responsibility ended, had overseen a foolish deployment of close to 550,000 American troops over eight years. The Nixon Administration immediately reversed the process and began withdrawing. . . .

"The Paris agreement was the final element of a reshaped American foreign policy that -- rather amazingly -- provided the nation with the chance to play as influential a role in the world as it had before the paralyzing despair of its Vietnam involvement."

Senator Kerry can serve America by a full and fair inquiry. That opportunity will be lost if the investigation is influenced by any vendetta against Mr. Kissinger. The country deserves better. So does Henry Kissinger.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 29, 1992, on Page A00023 of the National edition with the headline: On My Mind; Kissinger, Peace and P.O.W.'s. Today's Paper|Subscribe